


but the eternal pose points East (Lech L’cha)

by fallingwish, grainjew



Series: stared at the sun and the sun smiled back and called itself pirate king (or: loyalty, on the high seas) [9]
Category: One Piece
Genre: (connie helped write this and she also loves the straw hats), Canon Compliant, Gen, Hey Folks My Names Zephaniah And I Love The Straw Hats, Loyalty, Oneshot, POV Outsider, Post-Canon, Temporary Amnesia, also dalton is there for like five seconds, yes i know what this looks like but i swear its canon compliant. i can explain.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-02
Updated: 2018-10-02
Packaged: 2019-07-23 14:35:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16160864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallingwish/pseuds/fallingwish, https://archiveofourown.org/users/grainjew/pseuds/grainjew
Summary: "There's somethingwrong,Aladine," says Jinbe. His hands tense minutely on the wheel. "I... Something isn't right, and Brooke and Franky and, and," he gestures with one hand, a frustrated motion, "and, and they, they all know it too. We need... There'ssomething..." He grimaces. "Something'smissing,and I can't put my finger on it. And we're beingdrawnto East Blue."Jinbe gathers the crew.





	but the eternal pose points East (Lech L’cha)

**Author's Note:**

> holy shit, i hear you saying. a grainjew fic with an actual plot?
> 
> anyways connie was so significant to the creation of this fic that shes listed as a co-creator instead of it being a gift for her. literally this was her idea originally and all the brainstorming was done in tandem. could not have done it without her, everyone appreciate connie fallingwish!

"We need to go to the Florian Triangle," says Jinbe one day, with no context, no preamble. He is turning the ship around before any of them can protest and once they can gather themselves to ask why, he is too focused on talking to the local whale sharks to answer properly, or at all.

 

What they find in the deep, suffocating fogs of the Florian Triangle is an unnervingly melancholy rendition of a sea shanty fraying its way across waters still like deep colored glass, and then a ship as frayed as the song, and then a skeleton.

The skeleton jumps the gap between their ships faster than their eyes can track, is in front of Jinbe before they can even draw their weapons or make fighting stances.

"I know you," it says. Jinbe does not flinch under its stare.

"Yes," says Jinbe, steadily.

"Yohohoho!" laughs the skeleton. "I suppose that is that! Now, fine friends, may I join y—" He cuts himself off abruptly, shakes his head like he is shaking off water. "May I join this crew, for the interval?"

 

The whale sharks navigate them safely out of the fog — Paradise log poses are notoriously fickle about their single chosen paths, and with how every course converges momentarily on Fishman Island it would be too much of a gamble to bother following one — and the crew takes shifts at the helm to cover for Jinbe disappearing with the skeleton into his quarters, heads bent low in confused conversation.

Gossip ripples its way through the ship, washing its way all the way to the bow and then the stern like the tide, but none of the chatter can discern how the two might know each other, or what they might be speaking of.

 _Jinbe will tell us when he’s ready_ , soothe their oldest members, who had watched over Fisher Tiger’s deathbed and heard his dying words. _Wait and see, leave him be._

The gossip tapers slightly, but never quite dissolves, sea foam into dusk, even as the skeleton and his raucous, musical merriment, the way he laughs and the way he stares into space when he is not laughing, become something approaching familiar.

 

Water 7 is all bustle and flying water but they hardly see any of it, because when Jinbe has the anchor lowered in the sea-side shadow of a small peninsula, a human who looks more like child’s imagined version of a robot than anything real drops the wood he is carrying, strikes a pose, and shouts “SUPER!”

The crew notes that he is not wearing pants but, considering the merfolk among them, really cannot find it in themselves to judge.

“Coming aboard?” asks Jinbe. The entire crew turns to stare at him instead of at the robot human.

“That’d be _super_!” says the robot human, already climbing up the reinforced ladder one of the crewmembers had thrown down without really thinking about it. “Iceburg can handle the place on his own, we’ve all got somewhere to be, wouldn't you say Brooke?”

Brooke hasn’t even introduced himself yet, but he doesn’t seem nearly as surprised as the crew that the robot human knows his name, just offers him a bony hand to help him on deck and a cheerful laugh to answer his question.

 

Aladine comes up to Jinbe that night, when the robot human named Franky has been settled in one of the captain's (SUPER!) spare hammocks because of his size, and taps him on the shoulder from where stands contemplatively at the wheel.

"Hm?" Jinbe doesn't look away from the sea in front of him. "Aladine?"

"What's going on, Jinbe?"

Jinbe doesn't answer for a long moment, still staring at the sea. "There's something I can't shake."

"Hm?" says Aladine, more of a listening noise than a question.

"There's something _wrong_ , Aladine," says Jinbe. His hands tense minutely on the wheel. "I... Something isn't right, and Brooke and Franky and, and," he gestures with one hand, a frustrated motion, "and, and they, they all know it too. We need... There's _something_..." He grimaces. "Something's _missing_ , and I can't put my finger on it. And we're being _drawn_ to East Blue."

"...East Blue?" Aladine can't help the incredulity that seeps into his voice, even over his growing concern for his captain. The weakest of all seas, with the lowest bounties and least activity? The sea where Arlong went?

Jinbe sucks in a breath, almost pained. "East Blue. We need to have been there yesterday. _Weeks_ ago. I need to, I need to—"

 

Nico Robin slips onto their ship like a shadow or a silken noose, appearing without fanfare in the middle of dinner on their way to Drum.

Jinbe, Brooke, and Franky take one look at her and nod slightly, or yohoho, or smile, like she is entirely supposed to be there. The rest of the crew panics. She just giggles, and slides into an newly-empty chair.

 

Drum is cold, too cold, and Aladine can already feel the delicate skin of his gills growing red and irritated by the frozen air as their ship is surrounded by wary humans pointing guns. Jinbe manages to defuse the situation with well-placed words and somehow without anyone getting shot, and before Aladine really knows it he is cradling a mug of hot soup by the hearth belonging to the leader of the humans. Jinbe is there too, as are Franky and Brooke and Nico Robin. The rest of the crew came to some sort of unanimous agreement about too many fishmen looking threatening and not wanting to freeze off their extremities and stayed on the ship.

"That's the thing," Franky is saying, "we really don't know."

"One of _ours_ is here," says Nico Robin, low and intense like Tiger used to talk to those of them who'd been slaves, before. Aladine knows without even thinking about it that he is not included in Nico Robin's _ours_ , and is almost jealous to see Jinbe and Brooke and Franky lean in towards her at her tone, moths to the moon, seals to the surface of the sea.

Brooke counts down long bony fingers. "Fourth. The cook."

"The cook," affirms Jinbe. "I'm afraid we really cannot tell you more, Dalton-san. It's all just... out of reach."

"Well, I—" says Dalton, as Aladine takes a sip of soup, and then cuts off as the door opens.

A small dog-like animal walks in, spots Aladine’s companions, and then all five of them _melt_. There is no better word the sheer _relief_ that permeates the room, saturating even Aladine’s weak Observation Haki like warm butter.

The animal says, for all of them, " _Oh_."

After that, everything is a little bit of a jumble. Aladine somehow ends up learning that the animal’s name is Chopper and that he is not a dog but a reindeer, because dogs, Chopper says, have neither antlers nor hooves.

Also they usually don’t talk, but neither do reindeers — that is just Chopper’s rather unusual devil fruit.

He fits with the other four, somehow, like the individual strands of a braided rope, sturdy in their unity and twining around each other in a way much more practiced than ten minutes of acquaintance ought to create. But there is a fraying, still, an unravelling that even Aladine, unexpectedly an outsider, can sense. The strands are not wound tightly enough yet.

 

On their way back to the ship, Aladine turns to Jinbe and comments, “If you wanted to build fishman-human relations, maybe you should have picked up some humans who actually look the part.”

Jinbe laughs, but doesn’t refute the statement.

 

Alabasta is the wrong way entirely to East Blue from Drum, but somehow they end up there anyways.

Like the tide coming in, Princess Vivi is standing on a dock waiting for them, dark-skinned and blue-haired and gilded all over like the goddess of the sky come down to meet the sea.

“You're going the wrong way,” she says, eyes glinting with an amusement that reminds them of someone they can't quite place.

“I am aware,” says Jinbe. He makes a gesture with one hand, East towards the sun. “Are you…”

“No,” says Princess Vivi. “I feel it, I cannot help but feel it and _want_ desperately whatever it is you all have, but I belong here. I belong here, in Alabasta.” She smiles, and there is an edge to it like dawning. “But the least I could do was point your way, and ask you to send my regards to, to,” she waves a hand, tilting her head birdlike to the side, and then settles on, “the Captain, I think.”

“As you desire, Princess. Though we would gladly have you aboard.” He dips his head very slightly, Knight of the Sea to foreign royalty. “And thank you.”

“Just call me Vivi. After all, we're, uh,” she reaches for a word again, finds it fluttering out of her grasp, “friends. Friends!”

“Indeed we are,” says Jinbe. “It has been an honor; I hope to visit for longer next time.”

And so they sail away, and leave her glittering on the shore with all the light of dawn in her eyes to rejoin the sky.

 

They emerge on the Blue side of the Calm Belt running only on the exhausted, confused determination of Jinbe and the humans and the entire crew’s desire to eat a single meal without being forced to run from Sea Kings partway through.

The wind catches the sails, and they make joyful ceremony out of dismantling the contraption Franky had installed so that the strongest swimmers could switch off pulling the ship as the rest of the crew kept them alive. Chopper and the rest of the cooks spread a feast out on deck, salted meat and dried seaweed and hardtack and a fresh haul of fish they catch on rods in their newfound leisure-time.

“You know,” says Nico Robin, smiling deviously over a bite of cheese and the smoked _lapin_ Dalton had gifted them back on Drum, “log poses don’t work in the Blues. We have no way to navigate.”

“Really, Robin?” asks Chopper anxiously.

“Well that’s not _super_ at all,” says Franky, speaking for both himself and the other navigator, who has gone below to see if they have a compass after all. “Crud.”

Jinbe walks over to the wheel and turns the ship towards the sun, unconcerned. “We were not using a log pose in the Grand Line, either,” he reminds them, and everyone stops looking panicked in favor of embarrassment. “What is drawing me, is drawing us, is stronger now. We will not get lost.”

“Well, there’s that,” says Nico Robin, sounding only a little disappointed. She laughs quietly and Jinbe tilts his head at her, crinkling his eyes, until she sticks her tongue out at him, and Aladine cannot follow a word of this silent, familiar conversation.

It feels strange, to be the outsider against the comrade-in-arms he has followed for years.

 

When they drop anchor behind the floating restaurant Baratie, bracing themselves for prejudice but unsure what exactly to expect, they are greeted with a clatter of yelling and manage to walk in and seat themselves without being noticed despite taking up half the restaurant.

The other half of the restaurant is absorbed in watching a fight between an employee, another employee, and some customers. But when Aladine is just sitting down, the first employee cuts himself off with a sort of strangled sound, spins abruptly, and hastens to their table.

“You _came_ ,” he says in wonder, and stops looking irritated to just look breathless.

“Of course, Sanji,” says Nico Robin. “As every time before.” She frowns very slightly, what Aladine has come to realize is her perplexed face. “Every time before?”

“Robin-chan!” says the man named Sanji, his face lighting up until it stops, halfway, a window only mostly unshuttered. “But where is— Where—”

“Not yet,” says Chopper.

“But closer, closer,” says Brooke, in the kind of voice that pulls forth strings of longing in Aladine’s chest by the simple force of how deep it _wishes_.

Caught by it, a precarious silence settles.

“The sixth is the doctor,” says Jinbe finally, staring at Sanji, at the empty plates in his arms.

Sanji frowns. “But that isn’t right, at all.”

“No, it isn’t,” agrees Jinbe, eyes hooded. “And yet, it is.”

Sanji does not argue.

“Perhaps it all will make sense when we meet…” Aladine watches as his captain reaches, comes up empty. “...him.”

“Him,” says Sanji, understanding anyways. There is a note in his voice that Aladine cannot place. “Yes.”

“Come aboard, then,” says Franky, and something passes between them, and Sanji says his goodbyes, and steps aboard.

 

Somehow, between the endless skies of Alabasta and the rough warmth of the Baratie and onwards, the point of the journey stops being a concern, days bleeding into companionship as they banter over food and flee from sea kings and endure Brooke waking them up too early in the morning.

Now, when someone cracks a joke, even the most mistrustful — of Nico Robin, of an undead skeleton, of fake human kindness — laugh together with the humans as they relax into the gentle breezes and kind waters of the tamest sea in the world, unsure of their destination except that the getting there will be simple and the arriving will be achievable.

 

At Gecko Island, they are greeted by the hissing _whir_ of a warning shot and then a voice, artificially booming, warning them away for fear of dire and most likely fictional consequences.

Robin, brightening in that shadowed way of hers, cups her hands around her mouth and shouts dire warnings right back.

There is a distant wail of terror.

Two minutes later, someone stumbles onto the beach, flushed and breathing heavily. Sanji throws him a ladder as he wades through the surf towards their anchored ship, all his motions big and reaching and desperate, and Franky offers him a hand when he reaches the top, drips seawater from heavy clothes and coiled curls onto the deck.

"Usopp!" says Chopper, jumping on him for a hug, heedless of the wet. "You're here!"

Aladine goes to raise the anchor, certain in the knowledge that they have all they came for, and decides to let Usopp keep his dignity and attribute the salt water in his eyes to the sea.

They sit down, afterwards, and talk, Aladine and Jinbe's humans and the crew, coming and going.

"I'm a storyteller, not a historian," says Usopp, when Brooke counts down his fingers in that way he has taken to, when he is told hesitantly, uncertainly, of what his role will be.

Robin smiles bleakly. "Is there a difference?"

 

Aladine wishes, the whole crew wishes, whispers to each other, _I wish I knew what was going on_. Envy does not quite gain a foothold, not over the bone-deep certainty like a remembered scar that this is for the best, but there is a long moment nonetheless where they miss the past, when everything made sense and Jinbe looked to them instead of some horizon.

 

“Took you long enough!” shouts an orange-haired woman standing in a rowboat, when they are three days out from Syrup Village. The bottom of her little dinghy glitters with scattered gold coins like a starry sky, and everyone on deck stares.

Sanji, industrious and starstruck, throws her a ladder, and she scoops her gold into a spacious orange rucksack and climbs up while everyone else composes themselves and shouted names echo back and forth through the air.

 _Nami_ , her name is.

“I’m charging you all an eight-thousand beri fee for being late,” she says in all her glaring brightness and a voice that brooks no argument.

Not that that stops a single person from arguing anyways, and a comfortable banter, flying insults and cowering crewmembers, starts up between Nami and the rest of Jinbe’s humans.

It goes on until Aladine wonders why Jinbe hasn’t yet broken through it with his careful words of peace to keep some order on the ship, until Nami spots Robin and stops speaking in the middle of a tirade to throw herself into Robin’s arms.

“You’re the eighth,” says Chopper, squinting against the silence left behind. “The shipwright.”

“I doubt that,” says Franky, frowning like he also doubts his own words. “I doubt… I doubt that.”

“I’m not the shipwright,” says Nami, her tone final again. She puts down her rucksack and leans against the railing, like all the energy has gone out of her. “But I guess, if I’m the eighth, then I am?”

Robin, clad all in purple like pre-dawn, or like a bruise, advises patience in a voice tight with unease, and they disperse.

 

“Soon, soon, _soon_ ,” whispers Jinbe into the night, some forlorn _want_ behind his words, and Aladine knows that he is not meant to hear it. Jinbe never lets himself be seen desiring.

 

Nami returns from her ten-minute foray into some tiny, forested islet (“let me do this, I know this island by heart, I used to have a safehouse here, before… huh. before something.”) dragging a man with hair like algae and a face like thunder behind her.

“He was tied to a tree,” she announces to the world at large as she tugs him up the gangplank, her voice biting and unimpressed, “presumably so that he wouldn’t get lost trying to find us, wander into the ocean, and drown.”

“Hi, Zoro!” says Chopper.

Zoro ignores them, all the greetings and complaints, in favor of scanning back and forth across the deck with all the desperation of a starving man.

“Where—” he says finally, the thunder of his face crumbling into dust. “Him. The Captain.” He grips his swords in a way that looks more like he is holding a lifeline than he is about to attack. “ _Where_?”

“In time,” says Jinbe softly, looking down as though admitting his ignorance on this matter is the worst kind of betrayal. “In time. I don’t know.”

“Ninth is the musician,” says Franky, sounding dubious and just as subdued.

Aladine tries to picture music coming from the man in front of him, but all he can picture, all he can discern, is the sharp discordancy of a kind of unknowing grief as Zoro pushes past them and makes his way belowdecks.

 

Someone fishes a barrel out of the ocean, and that barrel contains a person.

More accurately, a person bursts out of the barrel, bright and energetic and _alive_ , a storm barely contained into the shape of a human boy.

A smile lights his face in joy when he spots Jinbe and Brooke, speaking in low voices over by the helm. They see him too, move towards him like a log pose called to the next island over, steady and unshaking, and Usopp joins them, set, gait level, from where he is fishing, sending the boy’s smile even wider. Aladine can only imagine how bright that smile would be, if all of the humans Jinbe had found were on deck to greet him.

“Luffy…” says Usopp.

All the threads of the rope these people make up are present now, he realizes, as he feels the world struggling to shift itself into shape around them, and all that remains is for them to be twisted together. The thought leaves Aladine sad, but giddy at the same time, and he cannot even imagine what Jinbe must be feeling now, with the final piece on his ship at last and bringing with it the motionless air of a hurricane just past.

“The tenth,” says Brooke, staring at Luffy like he is an enigma to be unravelled.

“The tenth is the helmsman,” adds Jinbe. His eyes follow Luffy as the boy walks over to the helm, touches it as though has never before seen the like, light and hesitant.

And then, fleeting, the moment is over, dissolving into a crashing chaos as Luffy grips the wheel and turns it with gleeful abandon and the whole ship _tips_.

Aladine is sent skidding starboard and then knocked yelping into the ocean, and has time to think _but the helm doesn’t even work that way!_ before he spots Brooke drifting by, bobbing mournfully below the surface as his waterlogged clothes drag him down despite the lightness of his bones. With resignation, he swims over and does his best to ensure the skeleton doesn’t die a second death.

Those of them not busy rescuing drowning Devil Fruit users work to flip the ship back up and set it to rights, and before long the whole crew is on the main deck, wet and shivering as the pale sun does its best to warm them dry.

The story spreads around the ship in whispers and laughter and outrage, gossip in rippling waves, and it is a few moments before Aladine notices Luffy standing by the helm again, not touching it this time.

Instead, eyes wide, he is staring at the gathering on deck, at the eight people Jinbe was drawn to and then Jinbe himself, staring like he has never seen them before, or like he has and is only just realizing it, staring with a sort of intensity that could put the Four Emperors to shame and shake the stars from the sky.

"You're..." The whole ship is silent, looking back at him. He has turned away from the helm entirely now, a sort of awe lighting his face, and his eyes flick around the deck of the ship like he can't believe what he's seeing. "Mine. My swordsman." He locks eyes with Zoro, and a tension nobody had even noticed escapes the swordsman. The swordsman?

"My navigator." He points at Nami, and she touches her head softly, gently, tentatively, eyes widening and hand trembling.

"My sniper." At Luffy's glance, Usopp ducks his head and scrubs at his eyes with a hand, suddenly breathing fast.

"My cook." Sanji's legs shake, and he puts a hand on the railing to steady himself, still looks like he's about to fall over.

"My doctor." Chopper freezes as his eyes meet Luffy's gaze, face falling to an almost disbelieving slackness.

"My archeologist." All it takes is the slightest movement of his head in her direction, and Robin's eyes turn watery, a hand blossoms out of nothing and grabs tight, desperate, to Luffy's gesturing hands.

"My shipwright." Tears are streaming down Franky's face as he leans heavily on the wall behind him for support.

"My musician." Brooke's hands grip tight to his cane, his bones clacking together in a distant xylophonic chorus as he trembles under Luffy's gaze.

"And my helmsman." Jinbe's mouth falls slightly open as Luffy stares at him. He is breathing hard, suddenly, like Aladine has only seen him do after a desperate battle or a death, disbelieving shocked gratitude pooling in the corners of his eyes like tears.

"My crew," says Luffy, wondering, still touched by that awe; and then more firmly: "My _crew_."

Brooke falls to his knees in a sort of exhale, whispers _Captain_ with a reverence that sets Aladine's mind spinning.

Luffy places a hand, gentle, on his musician's head, holding it there a long moment as Brooke sinks into the touch, and then turns to field Zoro's gruff hug and Chopper's desperate clinging and the arms sprouting out of his chest. Nami embraces the rest of Robin, Sanji is spinning Usopp around and then passing him off to Franky who wants a turn, and Jinbe is smiling wide and full like Aladine has almost never seen.

And Aladine’s memories, too, spin back into place.

 

Luffy flits between them over the next few hours, bright and reassuring and _around_ , and the whole crew is a mess of touching and remembering. When it comes Jinbe’s turn, he is standing at the helm, where he _ought_ to be, in the place he has stood for years until commanding the movement of the ship is like moving his own hand. Luffy comes up and pointedly doesn’t lean on it. Apparently even he can be cautious after a spill like that.

Instead, they stare at each other, and then Jinbe just breathes out a long, relieved sigh, and says, "Captain..."

"Yeah?" Luffy is laughing under his breath, has been since he came to stand here, and Jinbe can only guess that it’s at the concept of Zoro as a musician.

"Thank you."

"Hm?" Luffy tilts his head. "What for? You did all the work, getting everyone back together."

"Thank you for carrying the captaincy for all of us," says Jinbe, voice solemn. "It is not a position I ever desired, and that... whole experience was a reminder of the weight of it and the freedom you've given me— all of us."

Petrels cut corners through the air with their wings; fish, sharks, seals, sea kings trace circles underwater as jellyfish make lines with the currents. The waves sound, the wind sighs.

Gesturing wide, Luffy makes a face. "Ehh, but Jinbe, what else could I be than captain? You guys're my friends!"

"What else indeed, Luffy," wonders Jinbe. He laughs. “What else indeed? Certainly not a helmsman.”

Luffy wrinkles his nose. “Yeah, I suck at that.” He grins, big and wide as any ocean. “That’s why I’ve got you!”

“And you always will,” promises Jinbe, solemn again, as serious as he has ever been. He bows at the waist, a gesture much grander than he ever gave the World Government or Big Mom. “Captain.”

“ _Shishishi_ ,” laughs Luffy. The sound echoes outward, joyous, defiant, warmhearted. “I knew that already, Jinbe!”

He launches directly into Jinbe in some attempt at a hug, so Jinbe catches him despite the force of it pushing him back several steps, and they continue on like that, following Luffy’s glee across the seas and into the horizon.

**Author's Note:**

> im on tumblr @grainjew and connie's @fallingfish! pls come talk to me! idk about her but i do know that she makes kickass art so reblog that please she deserves it
> 
> anyways don't worry about sunny, she's safe on the new world island this nonsense all started on and they're now gonna have a bunch of fun adventures getting back to her!
> 
>  
> 
> me, on discord last january: the role-reversal au is good but also weird and kind of sad and im never writing fic for it  
> me now: how the turns table am eye right


End file.
